Sarah

Sarah’s story and personality comprise the entirely of the Labyrinth. Her fantasy creates and sustains it, and the conflicts within the story reflect the conflicts and change within herself. We could basically put the entire site under this section.

Anyway, Sarah is a budding thespian, practicing for open air festivals and performances with her dog Merlin. She’s the prototypical teen/pre-teen: grumpy, pouty, a little spoiled, and a lot short on real life experience. Her mantra starts as “it’s not fair!” but this is replaced by a wise acceptance of what it means to grow up and mature.

23 Comments

I have searched the web for the exact location in which the opening park scene was shot, some say it is NY, other say it is hampstead heath in London.

I have serious plans to visit the spot as the Labyrinth was a landmark in the formation of my personal aesthetics perception, and as far as I know it is the only “real” location in the movie. Of course it may have changed with the years, but I would not care.

I’m sorry to say that I don’t have any new information. I did some looking, and the two location spots are Upper Nyack, NY, and Hampstead Heath, like you say. The city scenes immediately following the park are in New York, I’m pretty sure, but other than that I don’t know. This labyrinth site seemed to have a bit more information:http://www.fast-rewind.com/locations_labyrinth.htm

This shouldn’t be too difficult a problem to solve. I am astonished that no one has reported the real location, given the amount of years since the films release. If it is Hampstead Heath though, it shouldn’t been too diffcult to find the exact spot, as there is a very distinct looking bridge in the background. I might take a look down there myself in the next few months and see if anyone there can shed some light on the subject. I will come back and report – with photos – if indeed it is the correct location.

Sarah has an attitude problem. I never got why she’s so mad at her parents. Her mom is a tad self-absorbed (maybe) but they seem nice otherwise. She sure is beautiful, though. And Jennifer Connelly did great work in this movie. Some of her reads (“There’s nothing to talk about!” “What a horrible place this is!!”) are just perfect !

But I can understand why she hates Toby. Jeez what a brat; all he does is cry! I’d totally wish him away and then elope with Jareth.

I love Labyrinth so much that I customized a modern American Girl doll to be a 12-year old version of Sarah 🙂 I’m still working on her collection (she has a couple Wizard of Oz toys and Jareth and Hoggle toys) and my own prequel story.

All of your answers have been quite useful. I will take this info and then work it out in Google Earth. I should be able to figure out the form of the pond and the bridges from an aerial view.
Gosh it will be great to visit the location one of this days! I´ll tell you when it happens.

The opening shots are, in fact, in Nyack, NY including Sarah’s running scenes from Memorial Park to her house. Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure that the house was just a shell built for the purposes of the movie only. The rest of the movie was filmed on sets in Hampstead Heath.

I heard that the house IS a real house in Nyack, which belonged to a producer or someone that had something to do with the film. I was told by a woman from Nyack that it’s located somewhere along N. Broadway, maybe in the area of Castle Heights, or Old Mountain (streets).

Awesome find Junior#20. It’s a little disappointing though to see that it isn’t as homely and nice as the movie makes it out to look. I might consider visiting the areas personally myself now that there’s info.

Jennifer Connelly playing Sarah was just perfect. She was too cute in this movie. Unfortunately, I realized this too late after having seen this movie so many times and never noticed it before.